GAUVIN: Sea Street offers “revealing” take on the politics of public priorities

Written by Paul Gauvin

May 16, 2013

The swallows fly back to the mission at San Juan Capistrano in California every year to build new nests. Snowbirds wing it to Cape Cod from southern exposure every year to pay taxes on their nests and to observe what those taxes have wrought.

For example, we flew JetBlue in on Wednesday last week, had a restful Thursday unpacking and a calm Friday inhaling the strong scent of blacktop being generously spread along Sea Street in Hyannis.

We were greeted first by e-mailed messages that our automatic quarterly tax payments were processed. Good. In three short months our taxes will again be processed automatically. Strange, though. Every time the town processes a tax payment, our bank account shrinks by the same amount plus 40 cents per payment for the service.

Each payment provokes unsettling thoughts. For example, it seems like yesterday that our property tax for a modest cottage was just over $1,000 a year. Now it’s closing in on $3,000. So the scary thought is, if one lives to be 90 without added income, will one be able to shell out from $4,000 to $5,000 to remain in one’s home?

Thankfully, it’s just a fleeting thought for now. We’re still young enough to feel invincible. Working hard to avoid a tumble into the pit of older-age pessimism, we compare the end-product of taxation between Barnstable and our winter digs in Mexico.

Our Mexican retreat is a modest 2-bed, 2-bath condo, with a modest 90-foot swimming pool, a modest golf course, a modest though extensive marina filled with modest yachts and modest fishing boats along modest man-made canals bordered by canal-front villas that are about as modest as the Osterville ocean-front manses.

All these things in Mexico must be modest because they are supported by truly modest real estate taxes. The tax on our unit overlooking a verdant golf course fairway bordered by palm, ceiba and other trees, is less than $100 a year; that’s correct, $100. And, if you are an on-time payer, you get a 20 percent discount. If you are an unwealthy citizen, you get a 50 percent on-time discount.

Our horizons have been broadened by living in another country, particularly one emerging from the Third World. The progeny of the brilliant Mayan civilization of 2,000 years ago today drive taxis, wait tables, cook for other people, clean other peoples’ leavings, build villas from limestone block and choke on the lung-encrusting dust in the process. Their suburban children go to schools just now being located in actual buildings with actual running water and actual electricity but no landscaping, dirt roads and few if any electronic devices.

Many of the local families live in dirt-floor huts with corrugated tin roofs under circumstances that would drive our health board into the arms of men in white coats and the building commissioner to contemplate suicide. Comparatively speaking, it is only that bad from the snowbird perspective of what we have here in our homeland.

The difference is taxes and the state of politics.

At first take, it is a bit surprising that the blacktop job completed last week on Hyannis’ Sea Street – the gateway to Hyannisport’s political potpourri - ignored what has been a standard rule that the “reveal” or height distance between a curbstone and a road bed be six inches in this town.

The practicality of that simple rule is appreciated when walking the streets of Mexico’s Playa del Carmen, one of the tourist hot spots along the Mayan Riviera. At some corners, you need a parachute to safely get down from the curb to the street, the reveal so extended. If you’re a snooty foreigner who walks with nose up in the air, chances are you’re in for a sprained or broken ankle, given the myriad undulating sidewalks checkered with potholes, missing stones, broken grates, utilities covers and plastered with other impediments you just don’t see in the First World.

The difference, we repeat, is taxes. Where we think we pay too much here, an honest person would have to admit we pay too little there. If that were not the case, we probably would be in Florida instead.

We like to think that here in Barnstable, we get the services we pay for, and by and large, we do, given intermittent exceptions like the Stewart’s Creek sewer project, which has engendered more complaints than satisfaction, and now the Sea Street repaving that has curb reveal churning up and down the rulerlike ocean swells, from nothing to an inch to four inches, but hardly seems, meeting the standard.

Daniel W. Santos, P.E., public works director, explains that the work done on Sea Street is temporary and the roadway is penciled in for a complete remake, with standard curbing, in one or two years.

Good. Old folks vulnerable to sprained ankles, young bikers to bruised skin or worse and property to sudden floods in the front yard only need to negotiate carefully for two years.

The politics of public works aside, it might be wiser to consider doing fewer roads per year, but doing them right the first time.